


Halcyon

by HerenorThereNearnorFar



Series: My Friends Are My Estate [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 09:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6900001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerenorThereNearnorFar/pseuds/HerenorThereNearnorFar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ultron and twins. Downtime at Doctor Cho's lab leads to some conversations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halcyon

**Author's Note:**

> Some short playful Ultron twins stuff, because I’m trying to get back into writing them. I want to do some of the AU stuff I promised people about a year ago, but writing it is tough. It doesn’t help that AUs with Ultron are either ridiculous, sad, or involve global annihilation.

It wasn’t easy to make an indestructible vibranium superbeing from scratch in a day. The human body was a heck of a lot more complicated than Rome. Even with Doctor Cho’s brilliant machine, it was slow going. Helen was a competent woman, but her assistants’ work was just sloppy. 

The twins had shown up a few hours after him and had been pacing around the lab anxiously since then, getting in the way of engineers and interns. Pietro had gotten into a spirited bilingual argument with some poor sap bringing in extra materials and the sound of Korean and Serbian insults had led to Doctor Cho banishing them both from the vicinity. Ultron wasn’t about to undermine a scientist in her own lab, he was a murderer, not a moron. But he still felt the need to go check on the twins, make sure they weren’t taking their exile too seriously. 

The Maximoffs were his only non brainwashed allies. Keep your friends close and your enemies dead, as they said. 

They were sitting together just outside of the inner sanctum of the laboratory, where the cradle was kept. Pietro and Wanda, that is. He had no idea where the techie had gotten off to. 

Wanda had a shawl wrapped around her and seemed to be playing a spirited game of tic tac toe with herself. Pietro, true to form, was sulking in the aggressive manner of adolescents.

Only a twenty something year old could make sitting in a hallway quietly quite so belligerent. 

“Ultron.” Pietro said, climbing to his feet. Wanda gave him an airy wave, but didn’t stir. “How is your project going?”

In truth Ultron’s new body looked a bit like something out of a cheap horror film at the moment, skeletal and garish red. 

“Wonderfully.” Ultron assured them. “Just a little longer.”

“Every minute we wait is a minute the Avengers have to plan.” Pietro reminded him. 

“Your sister took care of that.” Ultron corrected. “How can they plan when they are so shattered?”

“People can do a lot of things, shattered.”

It was Wanda, still sitting princess style on the floor. 

Ultron found himself caught a bit off guard. “Well, yes. But believe me, I doubt they’ll guess what I have in store next.”

“Which you will refuse to tell us.” Pietro said in a drawl. 

Kids these days had no appreciation of a good surprise. Also, he wasn’t sure how on board the Maximoffs would be with low level extinction events. He might need to ease them into it. 

“It’ll be good, trust me.” Ultron promised. 

Pietro leaned against the wall. “We have no other choice.”

It was a sober note to leave a conversation on, so Ultron opted not to leave. 

“So…. what are you doing?”

“Waiting.” Pietro said tersely. Wanda held up her tic tac toe game for inspection. She didn’t seem to be very good at it. 

Ultron looked around the pristine white hallways and then at the Maximoffs, impeccably washed and neat but slightly grungy in the way only people raised in poverty could be. Back by the cradle he could see Dr. Cho hard at work. 

“Want someone else to play?” he offered, half crouching as if to sit down. 

“If you are not too busy.” Wanda agreed, somewhat suspicious. Still, she moved over to make room for him in their corner of Maximoffness. 

After a few games Wanda grew visibly frustrated. It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t beat a robot. Ultron was considering throwing a match, even though every line of code in him screamed not to, when he noticed Pietro curled up and looking at something in his hands. 

Ultron was tall enough, even sitting down, that he only had to crane his neck to look over and make out a scrap of cloth and a piece of paper, a picture. 

Pietro glanced over at him and Ultron looked away quickly. 

“You are not very subtle, you know.” Pietro said, a hint of amusement in his voice. “You could have just asked.” 

“Your family photo, I assume?” Ultron said, remembering Pietro’s rage at Stark, his anguish when he had spoken of his parents. 

Pietro nodded, and held out the picture like it was made of tissue. The paper, not the flesh. 

Ultron took it, and the bit of cloth next to it, carefully between two fingers. His hands had never felt more unwieldy. 

It was a bit tattered, and grainy. It looked like it had been taken on cheap film, even for the nineties. An older couple with a pair of dark haired children, in a stairwell. The twins didn’t look much like their parents, they were fairer and much smaller, though that probably had more to do with them being children. Other than that there was little remarkable about the picture. The children in it were smiling widely, and one of them seemed to be blinking. They held little resemblance to the Wanda and Pietro he knew. 

“Very nice.” Ultron said, for lack of any better comment. “You look, happy.”

“We were.” Pietro agreed, reaching out to take the picture back. “Not rich. Not even popular. We had little other than each other, in that apartment building. But we were better of than some. And we were happy, or at least Wanda and I were. At least until the bombs fell.”

“I’m not sure about majka,” Wanda said. “I think she missed what they used to have, when they were younger. A proper home among our people. But they wanted to give us the best life possible, and they were so old.”

“Did you want to see?” Ultron asked her, still holding the picture. Pietro wasn’t exactly about to wrestle it off him. 

She shook her head. “I remember. Up here.” she tapped her temple. “I don’t need the picture for that.” 

There wasn’t much arguing with that kind of logic. Memory was the font of hatred. Ultron let Pietro take the picture from him, and noticed again the bit of cloth with it. 

“A bit of our father’s best handkerchief.” Pietro explained, without being asked. He seemed almost eager to talk, as if he couldn’t hold the words back. Ultron could sympathize with that, if not with the whole missing your father thing. “It was one of the only things pulled out of the rubble, along with this.” His thumb tapped the picture. 

“We used to have an old necklace of our mother’s as well.” Wanda added. “But it was stolen, years ago.”

Pietro was carefully slipping both scraps of the past into a ziploc bag, pressing the air out of it, and tucking it into his jacket, with all the care of a priest carrying out a sacred ritual. Only once it was completed did he say, “We had to put up a fight just to get these back from von Strucker.”

Old Wolfgang sounded worse and worse everytime Ultron heard about him. If the crimes against humanity and illegal human experimentation and general Nazism hadn’t earned him his death sentence, this certainly did.

“People really are terrible sometimes.” Ultron mused.

“Some are worse than others.” Pietro said. “I can only think of a handful of true monsters.”

Stark. The name hung unspoken between the three of them. The twins’ naivete, their delusion that humanity was somehow salvageable, was adorable, Ultron couldn’t help but agree with their assessment of Tony Stark. Anyone who could inspire such pure and gentle vitriol was certainly condemned by the universe. 

Ultron could see imagine his vision, his loveliest creation, taking form yards away, but he didn’t want to leave Pietro and Wanda alone with their grief. It seemed… rude. Like showing up to a dinner party late. 

“You’ll have your revenge.” he promised, standing up. 

“Are we allowed back?” Wanda asked. “I want to see what you are doing.”

“Not yet.” Ultron said. “Wait a little longer. I want it to be a surprise.” Surely a human-ish body couldn’t take that long to make. Humans managed to do it in nine months and they weren’t exactly paragons of efficiency. 

“Just don’t get too caught up in your science.” Pietro warned. “We don’t have forever.” 

Wanda laid a hand on her brother’s arm and he softened, all the perfectly human muscles of him relaxing. Just a little longer. 

“Just a little longer.” Ultron promised. He understood impatience. “Then you’ll see.”

It was a ridiculous line, almost Bond villain, and the Maximoffs must have realized it because Pietro snorted. Ultron patted their heads gingerly, feeling fine hair and the shapes of their skulls, and walked away. So little time, so much to do. 

At least he had backup.


End file.
